Friday, January 28, 2011

Egyptian activists have been circulating a kind of primer to Friday's planned protest. We were sent the plan by two separate sources and have decided to publish excerpts here, with translations into English. Over Twitter, we connected with a translator, who translated the document with exceptional speed.

What follows are side-by-side translations of nine pages from the 26-page pamphlet. They were translated over the last hour and pasted up in Photoshop to give you an idea of what's in the protest plan...

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How to Overthrow the Egyptian National Democratic Party

Wikipedia: The National Democratic Party (Arabic: الحزب الوطني الديمقراطى, often simply الحزب الوطني – the "National Party" or "Nationalist Party" – in conversation) is the current ruling party of Egypt. The party was established by President Anwar El Sadat in 1978; it was first announced on July 9, 1978 and formally approved on October 2, 1978. Since Sadat's assassination on October 6, 1981, the party has been chaired by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The NDP has enjoyed uncontested power in state politics since its creation...

According to a report from The Arabist, "Egypt has shut off the internet." ...

UPDATE: (2:10 a.m. ET) HuffPost reader Thomas Jaworowski, a tech enthusiast, emails in that he "decided to try a few tricks" to see if Egypt's Internet really was down or it was just server overload causing the problems. He traced IP addresses, particularly for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo which is hosted in Egypt, and found that the Web traffic is indeed being blocked at the country level, not just a simple censoring.

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James Cowie / Renesys Blog:

Egypt Leaves the Internet — Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic …